Author: Andrew Sullivan

I’ve been highly critical of some of the emails on Journo-List, especially those that seem to be speaking as “we” and suggesting collective management of various story lines, such as the Palin pregnancy and birth controversy. I’ve also qualified my posts by 1) insisting that these emails were probably swamped by many many others that list-members did not read, or care about, or that had nothing to do with a “line” of any kind, and 2) that while there’s some collective direction here, and some collusion, there is nothing resembling a conspiracy to set an agenda.

I am always distressed when I over-hear or encounter journalists who simply argue that a story should not be pursued because it would hurt “the cause” especially when that “cause” is the election of a candidate. However, after hearing from many Journo-List members, many of whom I deeply respect as journalists, I want to stress that my qualifications should have been more prominent in the Dish’s coverage. The vast majority of the list’s content, I am convinced, was harmless, even helpful to general discourse. I remain skeptical of the subtle dangers of groupthink that such a list can generate, especially in election campaigns, and when I read explicit exhortations to “leave this be”, my hackles rise. But these were, for the most part, un-coordinated exhortations, not regimented orders; this was a list-serv, not a conspiracy.

I do not withdraw my criticisms, but I should withdraw some of the hyperbole that I garnished them with. And so I do.

Elizabeth Warren – exactly the kind of figure the Obama administration should be putting front and center – looks likely to be confirmed, according to Noam Scheiber's reporting.

On the first anniversary of Palin's departure from her half-term governorship, Mudflats checks in on her promise “to chart a new course to advance the state.” Right now, she's camping with Kate Gosselin for TV.

Well, you could see this coming:

Newt Gingrich will deliver a major national security address at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Thursday in which he will reprimand the Obama administration's "willful blindness" to the threat of extremist Islam…

Gingrich "will warn," according to a synopsis of the event, "that now is the time to awaken from self-deception about the nature of our enemies and rebuild a bipartisan commitment, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to defend America." Never one to shy away from his somewhat professorial reputation, Gingrich plans to draw on "the lessons of Camus and Orwell" to explain "the dangers of a wartime government that uses language and misleading labels to obscure reality."

No word, one supposes, of "enhanced interrogation techniques". No grasp that fighting Jihadist terror may take more than polarizing rhetoric – or that polarizing rhetoric might actually make things worse. Notice too the "wilfull" blindness. That means the president is knowingly aiding and abetting the enemy. You can see the crude Cheneyism of all this: set up a fall campaign premised on the absurdity that the Obama administration is targeting white Americans for discrimination, run against the mosque blocks away from Ground Zero, and then accuse the president in code of being a traitor to his country.

It's all so Weimar, isn't it?

Reihan takes issue with the substance and tone of this Bruce Bartlett interview:

My central disagreement with Bartlett is that I don’t think it’s very sensible to interpret political history as a series of psychodramas. One could present the same facts in a very different matter, e.g., noble congressional Republicans only passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit because they feared demagogic attacks from the left, which threatened a massive political defeat that would impair their ability to pursue pro-growth policies. This is a specious and self-serving narrative. But is it any less specious and self-serving than congressional Democrats who blame demagogic attacks from the right for their own failures on the fiscal policy front? For those who believe that we need to sharply increase taxes on middle income households, this view is a commonplace. Democrats would take precisely this step, the narrative goes, if only they didn’t have to fear ferocious attacks from the Republican spin machine.

Kottke finds the "cutest thing on the internet." More images here.

Nyhan compares her favorables to Clinton's:

Though Clinton started 2007 as a less polarizing figure than Palin, the public quickly reverted to being sharply divided about her as she began to campaign actively for the Democratic nomination. Assuming Palin's remaining supporters will stick by her, she may end up with a similar profile in April 2011 as Hillary had in April 2007. In that case, a successful nomination campaign is plausible (and even a general election victory if the economy is in bad enough shape). However, her failure to improve her image during this pre-primary period may cost her the elite support she needs to win the GOP nomination.

What Republican elites?

Joshua Foust is critical of Wikileaks:

Quite possibly, the real damage this leak will do is to how the intelligence community operates. Last week, when the pundits were outraged at the revelations in The Washington Post’s expose on the intelligence community, much of it focused on how little agencies collaborate and share information. That is, when they find something important, they tend to keep it to themselves, rather than share it with the other 15 agencies that might be working on the same issue. The Post blamed this inability to share data, and the community’s inability to understand the sheer volume of data it collects, on several intelligence failures in recent months.

Think about what WikiLeaks has done, now. They have essentially told the entire IC that anything they write or say or make available to the broader defense community is, essentially, fair game to be made public.

Adam Weinstein explains who had access to this information:

Most of what you see on WikiLeaks are military SIGACTS (significant activity reports). These are theoretically accessible by anyone in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Tampa, Florida-based US Central Command—soldiers and contractors—who have access to the military's most basic intranet for sensitive data, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). Literally thousands of people in hundreds of locations could read them, and any one of them could be the source for WikiLeaks' data.